12 Incredible New Images of Galaxies and Nebulae from the Hubble Telescope

From Gizmodo

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Look up to the sky with the unaided eye and you’ll see lots of specks and globs that look mostly like stars. On closer inspection, though, some of those dots refuse to resolve, smeared out on the night sky.

Famed astronomer Charles Messier noticed these objects while studying comets—indeed, they looked like comments standing still in the sky, according to NASA. He therefore called these imposters “objects to avoid,” and catalogued them in his list of 103 “Messier Objects.” That list has since been expanded to 110.

It’s a good thing scientists didn’t avoid the imposters, though. It turned out to contain some incredibly important astronomical objects, smeared out because they consisted of not one, but many stars. The first comet-looking thing, M1, was the now often-studied Crab Nebula. His catalogue also included the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), the pinwheel galaxy often used as a Milky Way lookalike (M101) and the Whirlpool galaxy (M51a). You, too, can spot many of these objects with an amateur telescope.

Read more: https://gizmodo.com/12-incredible-new-images-of-galaxies-and-nebulae-from-t-1823921491

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I'm going to spark a bowl and stare at the universe for a while.

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